


To Spot a Wolf in Human Form

by Anonymous



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-15
Updated: 2020-12-15
Packaged: 2021-03-10 00:06:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27624478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Kudos: 1
Collections: Anonymous





	1. Chapter 1

“Tragic, just tragic I tell you! What’s the world coming to? More mudbloods around than ever, and wizard children mauled to death by beasts and half-breeds, living among filthy muggles like beasts and vagrants…”

Lyall tuned out Selwyn with practiced ease. As he strolled through the helter-skelter ruckus of the Department for the Regulation of Magical Creatures, he caught snatches of bereaved gossip about the case that had taken the department by storm. It had even featured on the first page of the Prophet, sharing headlines with the usual political gossip due to it being a slow news week. 

Just the night before, two children had been brutally mauled to death. Lyall hadn’t seen the photographs— he worked with spirits, not creatures (he couldn’t stand the smell of blood) but he had heard it was worse than usual. The children, two muggleborn siblings, had been dragged from their beds, gutted, and cannibalized. One had been so savaged as to have nearly been decapitated. Just thinking of it turned his stomach— in his mind’s eye he could easily picture it. Little six-year-old Mabel, dragged out of her bed through the house by the neck, and the elder sister Justina, who’d valiantly tried to fight off their assaulter and been gutted viciously for it, left to bleed out alone in the hallway as she crawled after her sister. Every time Lyall heard the story, he saw Remus, his dear child, in Mabel’s place, and darling Hope in Justina’s. 

“...It was a werewolf I heard...oh, at least they were girls, the poor things…”

“A werewolf?” Lyall asked, horror evident in his voice. 

“Oh hush,” another woman said. “They’ve a suspect in custody, nothing so horrid as a werewolf. Gertie is convinced the children were killed by a creature when evidence points otherwise.”

“No evidence at all for the culprit being a werewolf?” Lyall asked, uncertain. Things were never as it seemed when one dealt with spirits and the mysteries of the undead. 

“Oh no,” Gertie said mockingly, “How could it possibly be a werewolf? Dragged the poor babe through the house and out nearly a click before disemboweling her. But the older child was killed immediately, deliberately.” She snorted angrily. “Sounds fishy to me I say! I say, it’s a wolf! Hunter of man of magic! Bane of man’s heirs!”

“It’s likely one of those muggle serial killers,” the other woman, who had dismissed Gertie. “You said it yourself; the werewolf hunts  _ wizards _ and their heirs. Two little mudblood brats haven’t the magic to rub two galleons together. The girls were hardly in a wizarding village.”

“You take that back, Margaret!”

Considering Lyall himself lived in Wales, in a muggle village, he was liable to agree with Gertie. 

“Quite barbarous, those muggles!” Margaret continued self-importantly, and Lyall quietly removed himself from the conversation, his heart racing. 

He had a reputation for being unassuming and easy to forget, but terribly effective and skilled. What Lyall Lupin lacked in power, he made up for in precision, self-control, and steady level-headedness where most other wizards would falter. 

It was well known that he had married a muggle, so his reputation had suffered greatly for it, never mind that he had never been of upstanding pedigree. ‘Pure’ blooded in the sense that only for three generations no one in his family had married a muggle or muggle born, but his mother was romani of no significant name with no education and his father a hunter in a long line of hunters with little interest in a formal magical education. Lyall had been the first in his magical family to become a proper wizard, and it showed. Even subtly, he had always been apart from his wizarding peers. Now that he had married Hope, whenever these proper wizards spoke of muggles, a glance was thrown his way, suspicion or disdain in their eyes. 

But the prejudices of petty women did not concern him. 

Just before he reached his cubicle to file his last case— the exorcism of an empty doll brought to life by a hundred years of love by children— a heavy palm landed on his shoulder. 

“Got a mo, Lyall?” a raspy, but high voice inquired, and Lyall glanced over his shoulder at Amhar Prewitt, the Muggle Victims expert in the division. “Something you might be specially qualified for…”

“Oh?” Lyall asked, doubtful, because he recognized that tone, the same one everyone got right before they asked him about—

“Your wife, she’s a muggle, isn’t she?”

Lyall said nothing, allowing the silence to speak for itself until Prewitt cleared his throat uncomfortably. Everyone knew Lupin was too polite to say anything, but his wife was a sore spot. He was known to be an intensely private man. 

“Yes, well. Um. I’m sure you’ve heard about the murder—turns out the suspect’s a muggle.”

Lyall sighed quietly through his nose and gathered up his coat. This was nothing new. To real wizards—  _ pureblooded wizards— _ he was either a traitor or a curiosity for marrying a muggle. As if marrying a muggle suddenly made him a representative of them, an endless fount of knowledge of their lifestyles, an expert interpreter of their strange and mysterious ways. 

As if all muggles were the same.

It got old fast. 

“Lead on,” he said, putting Prewitt immediately more at ease. 

The holding cells for muggles were not in the Beast Division, but not very far from it either, deep in the coldest belly of the Ministry. They only had to go down one floor. Muggle criminals were housed with the animals, not the wizards. 

The suspect sat in a chair, head limp and hanging between heavy shoulders. He had the build of an alcoholic rambler— too many layers of tattered, ragged clothes and a hefty scraggly beard disguised ruddy fat cheeks, swollen eyes, and heavy middle. 

It was his eyes that stopped Lyall in his tracks. Those eyes, he noted not for their color, or the pattern of swollen and burst veins, but for their canny hunger. 

His mother had feared no God, unlike Hope, who was a devout Anglican in every way, but utterly believing in the spirit, soul, and therefore demons. 

And the demon of his mother's nightmares had been the wolf.

_ The werewolf. _

She’d been quick to throw off her maiden name in the 30s, when she’d still lived in Bucharest. She’d traveled with her family to France, as was her clan’s tradition in the summer. His father had been hunting with his brothers where the hunting was good— war left plenty of dregs and deluges for dark things to flourish. Though far from their ancestral homes, the Scotsmen had stayed on the continent where the pickings— and the pay— was good.

She’d been a fair hand at divination, but had disbelieved her own visions, too charmed by an exotic fling she’d been sheltering in her tenant house to pay mind to her mother and brothers. A vagabond young man, a former soldier of the Empire who’d been left destitute by the war. 

A pretty story, until he’d slew her brother and savaged her, and she avenged them after hunting him down on the full moon. Nothing so attractive to a Lupin as having prey stolen from beneath his nose, Lyall’s father had been enamoured and eloped with her immediately, pregnant with a werewolf’s child or not. She always claimed he was a blessing in disguise; the year after she’d left her family to elope with his father in Scotland, her family had been taken to the concentration camps and killed. The same wolf who ruined her led her by chance to her savior.

He’d been named for it, though he was perfectly...ordinarily...completely human. 

But he would die before failing to recognize that hunger. 

“The signs, Lyall,” she’d repeat, “the signs. They look human, but they are not. They are hungry. They are angry, and they are alone.”

_ Hairy tongue, hair beneath the skin, reddened eyes, a waxing and waning condition with the moon, strongest at the full and lowest at the new, fingers and toes all the same length, curved nails, jagged teeth, aversion to pure silver. _

The man shuddered, and a foul and vile stench rose from his waking corpse. A smell of rotting meat, piss, shit, and old blood. He did not look at Lyall after that brief eye contact, rolling his head as if he were drunk. Lyall could tell he wasn’t. Hope was vivacious and could outdrink him on an empty stomach; he’d put her to bed often enough to know.

“Can’t a man get a drink ‘round here?” the vagrant spat in a heavy accent, a dry white tongue speckled with black, short hair darting out to touch dessicated peeling white lips. “I’m dying for a drink.”

“Please state your name and age,” Prewitt said, high voice firm and unyielding. “If you want amenities, my good man, you must cooperate.”

He huffed, a wet snuffling noise. “Oh, so I’s a good man, now eh? Drag a poor man from his only bed like an animal, and now I’s a good man?”

“You are under arrest for the murder of Mabel and Justina St. Paul,” Prewitt said imperiously, shuffling his papers as he nodded towards the other wizards in attendance. “Mr. Falstaff will present the evidence.”

Falstaff, a ruddy-cheeked older man well worthy of his name, waved his wand and the pictures flew across the room.

The vagrant suspect jumped, startled, and heavy black chains rose from his chair and bound him to the heavy iron seat. 

“What is this?” he shouted, reddened eyes bugged. His white, hairy tongue darted out again, and Lyall’s eyes followed it, watching his wrists as he struggled and his skin squirm, as if something crawled beneath it. “Some kind of joke?”

“Magic, isn’t it?” Lyall said, and when he spoke, the room quieted some, for Lyall Lupin was not one who spoke often, and when he did, his words were oft words worth listening to. 

The reddened eyes widened. “I don’t know nothing about no wand waving witches,” he snorted, and phlegm ran down into his wild, crusty beard. That tongue darted up into the mess to sop it up, exposing rotting black, crooked teeth. The eyeteeth were jutted and pointed, and the bottom teeth had been filed to match, accelerating their decay.

His eyes were laughing. 

“Where am I?” the vagrant cried, confused, and the wizards sitting around him in interrogation began to feel very foolish indeed, as he continued to beg for a drink, his bed roll, and call them crazy. With every spell cast he put on a show of rising panic. 

But a show it was. Lyall could smell a lie, and the filthy vagrant knew it. And so he laughed, for all he pretended to be afraid and ignorant.

When Prewitt took a break from the interrogation, Lyall pulled him aside. 

“He’s lying,” he muttered. “If he’s not at least a squib I’ll eat my hat.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Prewitt scoffed. “I’m beginning to think we pulled the wrong man, Find-Me Spell bedamned!”

“He’s magical,” Lyall intoned grimly, “And I have reason to believe he is a werewolf as well.”

“Oh, not you too,” Prewitt sighed. “Gertie’s been telling anyone who’ll listen that old tosh. I thought you had better sense than that, man!”

“Look at him,” he hissed, gripping the taller man’s arm insistently. “The eyes, the skin, the teeth, that tongue! All the signs are there!”

Prewitt tossed off his grip. “Are we persecuting muggles on old wives tales, now?”

“Yes, but these are not old wives tales, I tell you. He hasn’t got an ounce of magic because he’s a man-eater. His teeth— I bet he’s got more than thirty-two. His fingers are all the same length, and his nails are curved—”

“Well, Lyall,” Prewitt looked coldly at him, “I thought you were a proper wizard! We don’t ascribe to all that gypsy shit here. And the penalty on this man’s head is death, and we’ll not persecute him over nonsense you were fed by your mad mum!”

Lyall ground his teeth. “ _ Don’t.  _ Don’t you say a thing about my mother.”

“Or have you spent so much time with the muggles you’ve begun to think like them as well?”

Lyall stepped back with a scowl. He was not a very tall nor threatening man, but the hard look in his wood brown eyes were enough to stop a tough man in his tracks. 

Prewitt could not meet his gaze, and scurried away, back into the room. 

Lyall followed soon after. 

The interrogation was a farce. The vagrant skillfully played them, diverting every question about the crime to terror about magic, questioning like any muggle might. 

Or how a wizard who had little experience with muggles might have thought a muggle might have reacted to magic. Lyall wasn’t oblivious to the fact that he was the only pureblood in the room who wasn’t a proper pureblood. Who had the audacity to diminish his blood further, when he already stood so low on the social ladder…

And yet, he could not unsee the signs and those laughing eyes…

“He’s a werewolf,” he could hold his tongue no longer when the photos were brought out. 

It was a tactic adopted from the muggle police to photograph scenes. Wizards had taken it from the officers after obliviating them into closing the case, as was standard for when crimes against muggles were found to be magical in nature. 

Mabel had been nearly decapitated, but the gossip had failed to mention that her head had been basically bitten off. Her stomach was laid open, her legs bitten to shreds where the wolf had dragged the body to get better access to her abdomen. Justina had been flayed open from shoulder to hip in five jagged rents. 

Regular wolves, and most beasts, had four.

“Ah, Lupin,” Hanehan, who was officiating the procedure laughed, “Stick to ghosts and boggarts! What do you know about werewolves!” 

Lyall had grown up in Scotland, traveling the lowlands with his clan as his family had for hundreds of years. The Lupins were exterminators, wardsetters, and exorcists. After his first hunt on a full moon night, where he saw his brother, just thirteen and denied a wand for being a gypsy, cut a full grown werewolf in half, he couldn’t stomach the blood and turned away from the lifestyle. He’d gone to Hogwarts the year after, willfully abandoning his family’s hunting tradition to become a proper wizard. His mother had been overjoyed. 

Yes, wounds such as these were wounds he knew well. 

He couldn’t stand blood. 

“Reckons old gypsy tales are proof enough,” Prewitt sighed. “‘Look at him,’ he told me, ‘all the  _ signs.’ _ ”

“Are we going to start looking for warts on witches next?” Hanehan, whose characteristic jolliness Lupin had never so detested, cackled. “No, the man is clearly a muggle.”

There would be no justice for those poor little girls, Lupin realized as he gazed into those pale, reddened, mocking eyes. 

“Soulless, evil, disgusting aberration of nature,” he whispered to himself, “You deserve nothing but death. You and all your filthy depraved kind.”

And as those yellow irises flared and stopped laughing, Lupin was vindicated, because he knew the monster had heard what no man could have heard. 

“If my expertise will only be dismissed here,” he said, louder, “I will take my leave if this farce will continue. Mark my words, this monster is werewolf, a wizard-killer, and guilty.”

Just another day in the Ministry of Magic. Lyall wondered why he had thought or expected anything different, and then he went and filed his case. 


	2. Beast or Being?

From Gellert Grindelwald, Albus Dumbledore had learned a great deal. Every decision he ever took, he could hear in his mind his old lover’s counsel, and even then, the twisted philosophy they had built together drove him forward— for the greater good. 

Albus Dumbledore was an extraordinary man; he was not one for false humility, but he had been so thoroughly humbled in his life that he knew better than to think that extraordinariness was enough to guarantee a charmed life. Being special, intelligent, gifted, or powerful did not secure one’s place in the world. Indeed, who knew anything of Arianna Dumbledore? Dead at fourteen, killed and forgotten and overlooked. All his talent, foresight, power, meant nothing, and at that moment, that instant he fully understood the sacrifices the ordinary made for the sake of the greater good. 

He’d killed his own heart in a duel, and for years and years, could only enjoy small pleasures. 

The news came to him through gossip. News of the ordinary man rarely reached a man as extraordinary as Albus Dumbledore. 

“Poor thing,” the mediwitch, Anastasia, was taking tea with the Herbology professor, Deidre, looking over a rather gruesome case that had been published in the monthly medical annals she received. “Of all the newest medical records to be broken…”

“Youngest case of lycanthropy ever recorded, mm?” Anastasia passed the well read journal over and Deidre skimmed the pages. “Only survived because the mother insisted he be brought over to the muggle hospital, according to the report. Was seen by a Healer at his home,” she whistled in surprise, “that’d cost them a good number of galleons— and has been reported to have survived the first moon. The parents, who wish to be anonymous, have denied any and all study of this unprecedented phenomenon.”

“Didn’t I tell you muggles have some fascinating practices,” Jonathan Ermine, the only muggle born professor on the staff and the professor of the newly indicted elective muggle studies, inserted himself in the conversation. “Magic can’t heal a cursed wound, but they sew up lacerations like you would darn a sock! And they have these medicines which stop bleeding and sepsis—”

“Can’t heal a bone worth a damn,” Anastasia scowled, “We’ve heard just about enough about your miraculous muggles, Ermine!”

He was a man not easily chastised, and smiled brightly, nodding along. “Well, just so. What do you think Professor?”

Dumbledore was startled to be so suddenly included in the conversation. Being Deputy Headmaster, and senior most among the staff (and having taught half the staff himself), in the staff room, try as hard as he might, he had become accustomed to being treated with a sort of distance, awe. 

“Well,” Dumbledore stroked his long beard, lost in thought, “I can’t have an opinion if I don’t know the whole story. I’ve only caught the tail-end of it, but your passion is not one easily ignored, Jonathan.”

Ermine beamed as Deirdre picked up the article.

“Says here, a four-year old was bit in Wales and survived the bite and first transformation, beating the previous record by nearly six years. He transformed under Healer observation once before the parents declined further treatment. Now they’re refusing all further study and have as good as vanished off the face of the earth.”

“It’s the shock that does most pediatric cases in, if the mauling doesn’t.” Anastasia added, “You have to be close to death to transmit the curse. And it’s a mercy that an overwhelming majority of children don’t make it.”

“The family kept him?” Dumbledore asked, surprised. He’d grown up in the countryside, and knew well the dangers of the cursed beings in the night. 

“Yes,” Deidre frowned, “I can’t imagine sheltering a Dark creature…”

“Well, the child hardly asked to get bit, did he?” Anastasia shot back. “I think it’s awful they denied all the other werewolves the chance to look for a cure. Curses after the innocent differently, after all. Maybe we could learn something about it, even learn who to break it!”

“If only curses were so easily broken,” Dumbledore added, “and it can’t have been very easy for the family.”

“No, maybe not,” Anastasia smoothed her robe, passed over her annal, and sipped the last of her tea, “but sometimes you have to look beyond your own adversity for the good of us all. Read the article and tell me that’s not something worth studying!”

And that was the last Albus Dumbledore heard of the youngest surviving werewolf, until the term ended and he was cleaning out his office, redisocvering the annal, still turned to the page of the article and looking much worse for the wear. 

“Morphological Changes Observed in the Pediatric Lycanthrope, published in tandem with The Efficacy of Practical Healing on Cursed Lycanthropic Wounds, St. Mungo’s Press,” he muttered aloud, curiosity aroused. He conjured a large, squashy chair, as all the other seats in his office were occupied by stacks of term papers and exams, and sat down to read. 

The bitten child was referred to as “the subject” the entire double article, and though the article made mention of the location of the altercation, as the child’s mauling was termed, no other identifying traits aside from age, the entire point of the article, were mentioned. The healer had tried various healing spells known to break the morphological symptoms of the curse before and during the first transformation— unknown to him, it was actually the second transformation, an error he pontificated on in his discussion.

Transfiguration reversals, curse breaking, and even potions turned out to be useless. Nothing would halt the physical change of a werewolf in the sway of the full moon.

“This conclusion is thus drawn: all known healing remedies are ineffective on the condition of lycanthropy, even in the early, remedial stages. Innocence, which has been a known factor affecting the efficacy of curses, has no known reductive effect on the lycanthropic curse. Practical healing has been found to be moderately effective on cursed wounds inflicted by lycanthropes prior to, during, and after transformation. Practical healing has been found to be most effective during the peak of the new moon.”

He lowered the article, curiosity peaked. Yet, he could not stop the wash of pity that arose in him at the thought of the humiliation such a child must have experienced. And yet, he could not stifle the experiment that rose in his own mind. 

“Vanished off the map,” his lip curled, “and so unregistered?”

Such a dangerous thing, harboring Dark creatures was a crime worthy of execution, and in this rapidly changing world, wizards had only grown more and more conservative, insular, and terrified. The days of Albus’s youth, where attendance to wizarding schools was not mandatory, were long gone. 

Being deputy headmaster, he was responsible for the scoping out and integration of all muggleborn and half-blood students, hiring, approval, and training of all staff, and disbursement of student scholarships. And with these responsibilities came access to the Fourth Tower. 

Hogwarts was a fortress with four tall, crooked towers— the Gryffindor and Ravenclaw towers, to the north and south, and the tallest, the astronomy tower to the west. And the fourth tower— the eastern tower— was Unplottable, a sanctuary accessible only to the headmaster, and in it was a Book. 

The book preceded the Reasonable Restriction against Underage Sorcery, and preceded even the Ministry of Magic, and preceded even the castle itself. It was a small, oldish vellum journal, enchanted by Merlin himself, that would show any and all children capable of magic. Once, it had mapped out Camelot alone, and any and all practicing sorcerers, then expanded to include Mercia, then eventually all of England and what would become the United Kingdom. Today, if Dumbledore so desired, he could find every wizard and witch that existed in the known world. As the idea of magic changed, so too did the rules of enrollment in the school. Certainly, not since the lycanthropy curse was cast during the 19th century in its spreadable, virulent form it was known for today had a werewolf ever attended Hogwarts. 

Dumbledore was hardly permitted to be in the fourth tower yet— term had just ended— but old Armando wouldn’t mind. He trusted his deputy implicitly. 

“Show me,” he said to the book, feeling its magic humming beneath his hands, “A werewolf.”

The old vellum shuddered, and the familiar default— a long list of names in old english calligraphy— bled into the paper as a new list appeared, but the words were patchy, uncertain, with letters shifting about. 

“Ah, but is this beyond you, old friend?” he murmured, trying to make sense of the page. He should have known that would be too easy. 

The boy had been saved by muggle medicine, but studied by St. Mungo’s. A half-blood then. 

“Show me the half-bloods of 1960,” he said. 

The map shuddered, and a long list of names showed up. Albus scowled; for a second he had forgotten the Wizengamot had met, conferred, and passed laws clearly defining blood status. A half-blood was anyone with any muggle blood within three generations. 

Too many on the list to narrow down. 

“Show me the lost,” Albus said. Perhaps he was going about this the wrong way…if werewolves really were beasts and not beings, whomever this child was, they would've been expunged from the list, as one of the dead. “Show me the lost of 1965.”

And at least, the book showed him a comprehensible list. Children dead from drownings, accidents, disease. 23 of them in all. 

One by one, he copied each name, and where they had been when they died, and headed out.

All summer, alongside his deputy duties, he sought out the families of the dead and dying. It was not until August, while visiting a family to personally deliver the letter of a muggleborn witch, did his investigations bear fruit.

After his mandated breaking of the Statute, and gaining the parent’s acceptance of attendance, he for once, stayed for tea— he was often invited, and just as often declined.

“Did you perhaps know the Lupins, up the road?” he asked. Remus J. Lupin was a boy on his list of the dead, but the cottage on the edge of the forest was abandoned, stone walls bare, and the garden overgrown.

“Oh, yes, everyone in the village heard. It was tragic,” the mother, Leila, sighed, long after little Anne had run off with her letter to bed.

“But that’s what happens when you live at the edge of the woods,” her husband, Darian, mused. He was a working man, and had forgone tea for whiskey in the cool summer night. “All sorts of things in there. Been here all my life and I never heard of anything like that!”

“Oh? The child was on my list, but the house was empty.”

Leila frowned. “I didn’t think Ms. Lupin had a child Anne’s age. Didn’t you say letters were sent after the child turned 11 in time for term?”

“They only had that little boy,” Darien sighed. “RJ. Sweet kid. Anne would take Michael to go play with him by the old mines every now and then.”

“It was awful,” Leila sniffed. “We sent them things, asked her to let us know if they ever needed anything. But then they just up and moved.”

“The boy lived?” 

Leila blinked in surprise. “Well, where’d you hear he died? Just disfigured, I heard. They shot a feral dog in the woods afterwards, so the dangers gone at least.”

“Do you have any idea where they’d’ve gone?” Dumbledore asked, and Darien shrugged. 

“Well, you used magic to find us, and little Anne,” he said, “Why don’t you do the same for them?”

And wasn’t that a question. With that, before they could become more suspicious or afraid, and they were afraid, for all that Anne was over the moon, Dumbledore politely and jovially took his leave. 

The Lupins had lived off the beaten path, at the end of the small but tame woods. The half-moon was the only thing that lit his way. When he reached the cottage, he unlocked the door once more and ducked into the entryway, pale eyes watching. 

The walls of the first floor were old stone, but the second floor was much more welcoming. Warm carpeting covered the narrow, creaking steps and the hall, and one of the rooms. Each wall was covered in brightly patterned bohemian wallpaper, faded but for where photographs must have once hung. 

The uncarpeted room obviously must have belonged to a child. Paint was smeared along the bottom in childish fingerprints, and a short, stout bookshelf was abandoned and empty. Stars dotted the ceiling in fading, glow-in-the dark paint. But for these things, it was abandoned, empty of personality. 

“Revelio Haematum,” Dumbledore incanted with a loop of his wand, and per his expectations, a horror was revealed.

Beneath his feet, he stood in a puddle of blood— more blood than he thought possible a child could bleed and live. The trail continued, from the very center of the small room to the shuttered window. He threw open the shutters and leaned on the ledge, watching the illusionary puddle beneath his forearms glisten in the moonlight. 

“Oh,” he said aloud to himself. “It seems I have found you at last.”

Or so he thought. 

It was easy enough to find the father— Lyall Lupin was an unremarkable sort, a typical Ravenclaw who’d passed through Hogwarts solitarily like a summer breeze. Stern, insular, but proud, he was from a Gypsy family of no name and little standing. Dumbledore had had to consult his pensieve to remember him clearly, and found he could only recall his fierce brown eyes and implacability. 

His family had supported Grindelwald at first, he remembered, though he was unsurprised. As was common in the Orientals, his mother practiced magic with little care for the statute— even muggles knew gypsies had magic, though they believed it to be superstition. His father’s clan were exorcists of the oldest traditions, practicing the dark arts of sacrifice and denied wands for it.

Lyall was the youngest of seven sons, the last scion of the prominent hunting clan. He’d been more than content to let the tradition die with him, and had gone on to become a proper wizard with a proper ministry job— hunting and exterminating dark creatures of the spirituous kind, of course. There was no denying blood. 

In the ministry, every man, from the lowest secretary to the highest judge, was eager to have Albus Dumbledore owe him a favor. 

“Lupin?” Amhar Prewitt was a good man, and had been a good subordinate. He was compassionate, but canny, and a pureblood of good social standing. He was also a notorious mother hen, and was incredibly easy to talk to, being a family man and extraordinarily proud of his four children. “Good man! He went part-time, recently— mission work only— but he’s in and out. Just missed him in fact, I just sent a case of a suspected rouge dementor at a muggle sanatorium his way. Would you like me to call him back?”

“No, no, no need to trouble him so.”

Amhar was not so easily convinced, and Dumbledore reminded himself that this man had stood by his side for nearly forty years.

“Is this about…”

“Such things are in the past, and the son has proved himself very different from the father,” Dumbledore stopped him.

“Perhaps it’s not the father we should be worried about,” Amhar frowned. “He’s been strange, these past couple months. Been quieter than usual, refuses to consult anymore. Went part-time, and now I hardly see him except when he’s here picking up a mission or dropping off a report.”

“Consult?”

“Well, his wife’s a muggle, you know,” Amhar shrugged. “I figured he knew a lot about muggles, and though he’s always been reticent, he’s never been...withdrawn. He doesn’t even take lunch or dinner with us anymore. ”

Being an honest man, Amhar had never been shy about meeting Dumbledore’s eyes, and Dumbledore looked gently into his mind. Sure enough, he saw Lupin’s intense brown eyes, and felt from Amhar his measure of the man. Reliable, but odd, one content to mingle and leave, and for some reason, other. 

Amhar called it strangeness, but Dumbledore could see, through the memory, the one thing that had changed so drastically about Lyall Lupin was not some passing strangeness, but utter consuming terror. 

“Thank you, Amhar,” Dumbledore said. But Amhar was not yet done with him. 

“Things are changing, Albus,” he said gravely, “and not for the better. Now, I haven’t got a formal report, but I’ve been tracking the numbers, and I can tell you, they’re not looking good. Not at all.”

He slid a parchment over, then hesitated, and pulled another file.

“You wouldn’t ask me about a good man for no reason, Albus,” he said quietly. “And maybe you’re right. Maybe blood isn’t the end-all, but in his case I believe it’s certainly proved true. I wouldn’t think he would back the Knights, marrying a muggle and all that, but three months ago he vanished for two weeks. After that, he was different. Perhaps he’s been recruited. Perhaps, for all he married her, he ascribed to their philosophies. Can’t ever tell with him. But if the Order is watching, or will be…”

Point two, Dumbledore thought, I have found you. 

——

For all Lyall Lupin hunted apparitions, in life, he was like one. He had no friends, no family but for a dying mother who lived with him, and no one, it seemed, knew he had a 4, no, 5 year old son. Everyone knew of his muggle wife, as it was a popular source of gossip to run the mill when things were uneventful in the Department for the Regulation of Magical Creatures, but he had kept every other personal detail to himself.

Even from the ministry, against the law. 

The address on the self-updating employment form Amhar had given him was an abandoned wizarding household in a mixed village. Clearly, this was where they had moved after they had abandoned the muggle house he had tracked them to from the Book, but this one was abandoned as well. But the wizarding house showed signs of a violent struggle, and little personal care. The ashes piled high in the fireplace, and the yard and garden were untended. Dumbledore hadn’t expected to run into a dead-end that holiday break (he’d had to temporarily pause his search when Hogwarts started.)

With a singular personal effect Amhar had nicked for him from Lupin’s cubicle— a beautiful glass marble wrapped in wire, obviously a child’s craft— the tracking spell he had cast had led him on a merry chase across Wales and west England. The man was as good as vanished, appearing only to go to work and Gringotts. He didn’t keep his money in the bank; he only ever exchanged galleons into pounds, in cash, before vanishing again. 

Dumbledore would never admit it took him nearly five years of searching idly during his breaks to realize that Lupin was vanishing into Muggle Britain. 

This was no system Dumbledore could easily track. He had been born into wizarding England, and wizarding England he knew well, like an old friend. To walk into the Muggle world, as often as he did it for Hogwarts, was to walk into a foreign land full of strangers. 

It was entirely by chance that he ever found the Lupins. And considering the year, Dumbledore, who despite his misgivings had always strongly believed in predetermination and divination, knew it was purely fate. 

The tracking spells he had abandoned for nearly two years— at this point Dumbledore looked for the Lupins purely out of curiosity, for he was nearly certain the child had to have perished in these long years. He was not in the Book, and as the new headmaster Dumbledore was finding less and less time to pursue academic whimsy. And the child-bitings had earned themselves a notorious name, now, little Remus Lupin was simply the first, and the youngest to survive, but not the only. Over twenty-five children under the age of fifteen had been bitten. In the six years past, only an eight and twelve year old had both survived the mauling and the first transformation, and their wizarding parents had been overjoyed to have Albus Dumbledore take an interest in their children. He was the most powerful wizard alive, after all. If anyone could break this curse, surely it was him.

But some things were just fate, and werewolves were doomed to a tragic fate; to lose their minds to the growing beast. 

The curse had twisted the children, and as horrible as the curse was for adults, to see the burgeoning madness in ones so young was horrific, even as they tore themselves apart, again and again, until at last they perished. Every year that he visited them, he watched their eyes grow paler and wilder, the mutilations worse and worse, and frankly quite frightening maladaptive behavior. The curse of a troubled man, sped up. 

He appointed a new deputy in the meantime, and trained his replacement, a sharp woman named Minerva McGonagall in the development of curriculum and discipline. She was a Gryffindor like he had been, but a thousand times more fierce, a Master of Transfiguration and one of his earliest students. He’d been delighted when he saw her application. 

Indeed, life had gotten so busy it was easy to let this tragic curiosity fall to the wayside. His weather eye focused on Tom Riddle and high society as things changed. The war had changed everything, and the sharp turn toward the conservative the magical world had taken was only the beginning. 

Albus Dumbledore found Lyall Lupin in Snowdonia, on an ancient but shallow leyline. A tip from Prewitt had him following the line, supposedly following Tom Riddle. Albus Dumbledore would let no one pursue the half-blood who stylized himself as ‘Lord’ Voldemort but himself, and the new deputy had things well in hand.

Dumbledore spotted Lyall Lupin in the woods from the village, trudging through the wet mud in sensible shoes and plain brown robes, his office attire. And then, he vanished, turning onto a cleverly hidden path. Dumbledore disillusioned himself and followed, floating effortlessly above the ground because he knew for all he was a powerful wizard, he could not stalk through the woods as silently as this man. 

The cottage was a small one, under a hill, and heavily fortified. The wards on the home had been tied to the nearby leyline, so that they were nearly indistinguishable, and untraceable to boot. It hardly looked like a proper wizarding house— more like a muggle hiking rest stop, and so was beyond the attention of anyone flying overheard. 

Lyall entered, bypassing the wards as if they were not there, and Dumbledore stopped just outside them, where they hummed dangerously. Yes, he could understand why Prewitt might have thought the so-called Dark Lord would have an interest in a place like this. Once upon a time, a long time ago, this was a place where humans were sacrificed. 

Knowing Tom Riddle, this place was beneath his notice. Though the power was strong, and the power was dark, it was irrelevant to his history, and Tom had always been one for symbols and sentiment. This was a place of power preceding even the most ancient house of his mother. 

But the dying ashes of Dumbledore’s interest in the Lupin case had been stoked once more to flame, so he did what he did best— he observed. 

In the safety of such a powerfully protected place, Lupin was hardly careful. He walked into town down the road and rode the train for thirty minutes before apparating to the ministry every morning, where he would pick up his cases for the next two weeks, then go on them, then drop off reports. Other than that, the house was silent and still. No curtains ever stirred, and no woman or child ever left the house. 

The moon waxed in the sky. 

The week before the full, when Lyall was between missions, the back door opened in the dead of the night for the first time. A woman, wan faced but lovely in a plain way, stepped out into the brisk air, her hand wrapped tightly around a tiny fist. For a second, Dumbledore wondered if they had had a second child, for surely the withered, tiny thing beside her could not have been eleven, or nearing it, for he looked no older than seven. 

She spoke, firmly but kindly, and in welsh.

“Come RJ, don’t be like this. Be good for me tonight, and tomorrow we’ll go out again. But you have to obey.”

The child shook his shaggy head, leaning his face into his mother’s palm. If he responded, it was too quiet for Dumbledore to hear, but the woman— Lyall’s infamous muggle wife— seemed to have understood, and they trekked into the woods at a fast, exhausting pace. 

Instantly Dumbledore could spot the accidental magic of the boy as he flew above their heads, invisible to their eyes, but not to the boy’s other senses. 

The trees yielded to form an easy and smooth path for the woman where the boy dodged them deftly and unconsciously, turning his head up constantly at the glow behind the clouds that hid the moon. When she slipped in the pitch black, she was gently lifted to her feet. The forest fell dead silent around the two, a monster and a muggle going for a midnight run. 

They were out all night, and on their return into the old house with opaque drapes and a firmly shut door, Dumbledore knew that this boy, he had to save. This boy had to learn to control his magic as he controlled his wolf, for all he yielded to his curse on the nights of the full moon. 

In all the other children, he had seen a sort of ferality, hopelessness. They were already lost to the curse, and with every passing month they fed the wolf a diet of hatred and despair, until at last the wolf outstripped them and devoured them whole. Dumbledore could not, and would not, in good conscious advocate for them. Sometimes seclusion was all a family could do, for a cursed child. 

But...not this one. 


	3. Class XXXXX: Dangerous Beast

Lyall could not shake the feeling that he was being followed. 

“Hope,” he said quietly, on one dark and stormy night, “We should move.”

Hope’s face, once so beautiful, was aged with fatigue. It was not the physical look of the elderly, but rather, a weariness about the eyes and a stoop of her shoulders that made her look so much older than she was. 

“I don’t want to,” she whispered. With Remus’s hearing, all they did was whisper. “I like this place. It’s beautiful, and there’s always people about in the villages. And Agnes picked it out. This is the longest we’ve stayed in a place since…”

Since his mother had passed the year before. It was quiet, and sudden, and Remus had watched her last breath leave her body and sat calmly beside her cooling corpse for nearly a day and a half before anyone realized what had happened. 

“I know you’re attached,” he said, “but I think there’s a wizard following us. Or me at least. I think someone’s been asking around at the ministry about Remus.”

Hope had nothing to say to that. She only rocked, slowly, on her favorite wicker rocking chair, where once his mother had sat and taught her to embroider and embellish. After Remus was bitten, it was a lonely life for her, and she had always been so social, outgoing, and well-liked. A real modern woman. The home life was stifling to her, but she would damn herself before abandoning Remus, who in his younger days needed almost constant care.

“Always with the fucking wizards,” she muttered. 

“Indeed,” Lyall agreed. He had always moved around a lot, but now he was beginning to feel the fatigue. It was one thing to choose to move, and another to be on the run for fear of persecution and discovery. 

“Do you think...do you think it was that school of yours?”

Lyall sharply shook his head. “No. Impossible. And I’ll not have you filling the poor boy’s head with hope. Even if he did get a letter— and he isn’t human, so he won’t— I’d decline. They’ll kill him over there, Hope.”

She deflated. “I know...he’s so alone though,” she ran her hands down the narrow, parallel scars on her neck, where baby claws had tried to rake through her throat when Remus wasn’t quite in his human mind after a blood moon in ‘66. They all had learned, and were still learning. 

Muggles thought they were abusers. Wizards thought they were harboring a monster. And so it was the four of them, turned three this past year, and them alone. Everyone else was an enemy.

“Better alone and alive then dead,” he scowled and lit his pipe. 

The warm smell of tobacco filled their small, clean sitting room. The place was without personal effects, but well lived in. Every blanket on the couch Hope had lovingly made by hand, with mismatched dishes picked up from their travels in the cupboards and sink. Evidence of Remus’s study lay in neat piles on the dining table, and his small crafts were on the floor by the sofa. A single yellow electric light lit the room, a record player and a small stack of records in the right corner, a big square television in the right, it’s gray glass screen dim. It was their only luxury. 

“He’s not alone,” Hope replied calmly, “He’s got his father, doesn’t he?”

Lyall scowled at the backhandedness of the comment. He had abandoned the two of them with his mother in a wizarding village after the St. Mungo’s study had failed and been published anyway, desperate for a cure. He’d returned when Remus was just shy of eight and had been exposed in the village he’d moved them to after the bite. They’d nearly lynched his wife and mother and set the house ablaze— with little Remus in it, ailing from the full moon.

Hope had been cold for months afterward, but Remus had been so overjoyed to have his father back she had no choice but to forgive him. His son had his wife’s soft heart and forgiving nature, but tenfold.

“Yes,” Lyall bit out, “He has, and I will never stop trying to cure him.”

Her eyes softened. “Yes, I‘m just being a little horrible right now. I don’t want to leave this place where...where she died, you know. And Remus loves it here. We can go for walks in the woods. And the basement is deep, and dark, and the moon and the smell of blood doesn’t work him up so much.”

Stone houses were only as secure as their wooden doors, as they had very recently learned the hard way. Remus had since become even more reticent, and where before he spoke infrequently now he was nearly mute. 

“I know,” Lyall reached over and held her hand— these hands that had saved his only son, where magic and Mungo’s and all his skills had been useless. “But I won’t let them kill him.”

“Even if it hurts him?”

“The pain means you know you’re alive.”

And Hope began to weep, silent, slow tears that dripped from the enormous eyes Remus had unfortunately inherited. He liked them, though— they were black in the dark and brown like good soil in the light, and they could hide nothing. He hated the tears they leaked.

Lyall felt eyes on his back, and turned sharply behind him, catching just the hint of luminous eyes in the dim light. The entire house was one story and partially sunken under the hill, and Remus’s room was in the deepest, darkest crevice. 

Luminous, brown eyes, the color of buckwheat honey, the same color as his and Lyall’s shared hair, as if a child with only one brown crayon had colored in a picture. They reflected in the dark like an animal, and his mother’s eyes in his petite face made him impossible to hide. 

“Remus,” Lyall said sharply. The child knew better than to lurk, creep, and crawl like a monster in the dark. 

He walked forward on shuffling, limping feet, looking up only to meet Hope’s wet smile and shyly return it, with closed lips. When he met Lyall’s eyes, he shrunk back. He did not say a word. Lyall knew he would not. Hope could foster the human in him, but it was Lyall’s responsibility to kill the wolf, and the wolf knew that, feared him— but the wolf and the boy were one and the same.

How could he kill his only son? He could only make him better. 

And damn it all, Hope did have a point. Here, in the lonely hillfort, Remus was much better than he had been since he was bitten. It would pain them to leave, but Hope didn’t understand, not really, what was at stake here. Hope believed when he thought there might be a cure, Hope believed it was like a disease, and not a curse. Hope trusted him, and every second he betrayed that trust by not telling her the truth of the situation was a knife in his heart. Lyall had lived as a traveler; to move from one place to another was in his blood, and Remus’ too. But moving from home to home in a familiar pattern, following beasts was different from running from persecution.

One was living, and one was just surviving.

He hesitated; for a moment, he almost confessed, he almost told her the truth of the dire situation. They had been firebombed out of one home already, so she knew the danger was real. Could he tell her about the lynchings, the torture? How feral wolves would band together in the rare greenfields and tear each other to shreds between full moons? How wizards would slit a werewolf in two from navel to nose, and burn its intestines to make sure it was dead? How harboring a dark creature illegally was six months in Azkaban for every year in violation?

She was still so afraid of dementors…

He couldn’t tell her, how once, on a hunt with his eldest brother, they’d found a man, chained back, his arms, legs, and neck wrenched by the cold pitiless iron? He’d strangled to death as he transformed, unable to move, so tightly he was bound.

So many horrors awaited Remus if he allowed this wizard to find them, sentiment or not. 

“We’re moving Hope,” he snapped. “And if you cared for Remus at all, you’d trust me.”

Werewolves were the most miserable and detested of dark creatures, and it was only their human hearts that made them that way. 


End file.
